Trip to Las Vegas

    In the last post I wrote about my work in Las Vegas, but I did not write about two fundamental aspects: The city and its people.

    I have been in Vegas before, but it has been too long since then. I don’t remember what I did last time or where I went. This time, the city seemed new and old at once.

    Las Vegas is where decorum goes to die. In the Sin City everybody can easily buy drugs, sex and probably many other things that I am too innocent to know. Of course, doing any of this is illegal, but it is illegal just as talking about a taboo is. Nobody wants to discuss what is happening, but everybody knows it happens, and they know this because they are part of it.

    I am still surprised about the homeless people that adorn the streets. I have come to expect to see them, but somehow I am still surprised. I remembered the trips to NYC and how out of place the homeless looked near the luxurious stores in midtown Manhattan. They also look out of place in Vegas, but the scenario now was The Strip, surrounded by humongous casino resorts that seem conceived in the mind of a Saudi princess during an acid trip.

    And the girls… I could write a whole book about that. Girls in the US are so different to Mexican girls. For instance, they are overloaded with confidence an ego. And this is good. Mexican girls tend to pretend they are not interested and will rarely take the initiative, but all the girls I met in Las Vegas were the complete opposite of that: they approach you, they talk to you, they flirt with you, they take what they want and they do not care about anything else.

    I know what you are thinking: “But Alan, I am pretty sure they were prostitutes!”, and I see your point. Prostitutes in Las Vegas roam freely everywhere. Some of them are very obvious, wearing transparent cocktail dresses, fishnet stockings, and heels that double their height. But some of them are incredibly classy ladies that would not look out of place in a Nobel prize award ceremony. You can try to identify them and after a few days you will get good at it, but you will never know for sure.

    So, how do I know the girls were flirting with me and not my money? I know because all the girls who approached me were either staying in the hotel or working in the same place I was. In fact, two of them were staying a few doors from my room. Another one was a make-up artist who fixed my hair for some photographs. I was so focused on the posing that when she asked how I wanted her to do my hair, I told her to do anything she wanted with me. She told me that I should not say that. While saying that, she looked at me in a way that made me understand that she was already thinking way too many things that she could do with me.

    I don’t want to sound like I am bragging about all this. I am writing this because these are perfect examples of how people behave in Vegas: They come here to have fun and do not care about anything else. They drink too much, they have sex with strangers, they take drugs, they bet all of their savings and they do not care, because “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. Still don’t believe me? Go and ask that girl I saw while having breakfast, the one who wore only a pair of slippers and a tiny hand towel.

    In fact, all this made me think about prostitution in Vegas. As I said before, hiring a prostitute is extremely easy, you get flyers advertising “full experience massages”, you see ads in the streets and magazines promising girls from every possible ethnicity and their combinations, wearing any kind of outfit your pervert mind could envision. However, I wonder what kind of person would hire them while the other girls are so happy to take that role free of charge. I guess Cyndi Lauper was right: Girls (and boys) just want to have fun, and Vegas is the place to have fun, any kind of fun.